I wonder how you can hold to your government being fair for trying to persuade people from not killing each other by promising them punishment yet when a God does the same thing for the same reason he is bad?
I have not yet heard the problem of Jail being discussed
Jail is finite. You can be released from jail. Those who are sent to jail have the opportunity to contest their guilt. Jail is not deliberately torturous.
Oh, and god's punishment? not for killing. It's for failure to sufficiently kiss his ass.
I wonder how you can hold to your government being fair for trying to persuade people from not killing each other by promising them punishment yet when a God does the same thing for the same reason he is bad?
I have not yet heard the problem of Jail being discussed
I don't think you're actually reading the responses to the thread, because you've stated this exact point and it has been addressed.
Once again, a government can be evil if the punishments it doles out are not just or if the laws they consider worthy of these punishments are bad. It is possible to recognize the vast gulf between a western nation imprisoning someone (which I have issues with, which you seem to be assuming I don't) and a North Korean death camp.
In addition, government is a human institution made up of fallible and low powered humans. If human institutions are the best God can strive towards, he is an impotent God.
So what you want is for Him to unmake His rule so that you can be absolved without changing anything about your life?
Anyways, the logical fallacy of your argument is assuming that perfection involves having everything work out for everyone regardless of what they choose. His perfection is having no flaws. His perfection demands laws be made regarding sin or else He will become impure. The perfection requires rules, it does not mean He does things in a manner convenient for you.
If god was perfect he wouldn't have allowed sin to exist in the first place. I would argue Sin is a flaw in his design his hatred for sin is a flaw in itself. a perfect being would be unable to become impure regardless of outside stimuli.
Lovely way to put it. Accepting God's love for you and receiving Jesus as lord and savior is "kissing his ass".
It wouldn't be my choice of words, but it's a fairly accurate description of the mob boss who is forcing you to accept them as your lord and saviour on pain of breaking your knees. Not exactly something I would describe as "loving."
A reminder, replace "breaking your knees" with "forcing you to undergo unimaginable torment for the rest of eternity." Imagine if Al Capone could have threatened you with that.
God/Jesus loves us, and it is up to us to accept and reciprocate on that love. If you do so, then you are saved and will God for eternity.
If you do not, then you remain separated from God for eternity and go off to Hell upon death.
Because, while God loves everyone, he also loves justice, and he cannot accept anyone who refuses to atone for their sin.
This is different from the mob boss analogy you attempted.
Look, I get that people don't like the premise that we are all sinners who cannot remove our sins through our own actions and can be saved only by accepting Jesus. I don't like it.
I don't like a lot of Christian ideologies and beliefs regarding what is sin and what isn't.
But what I dislike more are people who belittle opinions without even trying to understand the other or respecting them.
And there is an utter abundance of that from a good number of people in this forum.
Heck, the overwhelming majority of people I see online are like this.
But what I dislike more are people who belittle opinions without even trying to understand the other or respecting them.
You aren't allowing for the possibility that people like me do understand Christianity and that our responses are a result of that.
You're asking me to respect beliefs that are morally bankrupt and not evidently true. It's a disrespectful belief system so that says that you and me and everyone else is so horrible and irredeemable that we deserve no less than eternal torture. Why should I respect that?
I'm with Zaphrasz on this one. I understand Christianity quite well as I was once quite an ardent believer; but I left because of all the logical and moral inconsistencies, especially as pertains to Hell and God's alleged justice.
Here's another angle: based on Isaiah 7:15 and Jesus's declaration that the kingdom of heaven belongs to "such as these" (referencing little children), Christianity has overwhelmingly adopted the doctrine of an "age of accountability." The idea is that before a certain age children cannot be held culpable for their sins, since they simply don't know any better; and therefore, any child who dies before this age is unconditionally let into Heaven. The doctrine makes sense on a visceral level, since not even the most callous person would claim that babies and toddlers could deserve the tortures of Hell.
Of course, there's no agreement as to what the age of accountability actually is; but a much larger and more disturbing problem with this idea presents itself. Namely, if God really wanted to save as many souls as possible, wouldn't he snuff our lives out before it even became possible for us to damn ourselves by our own folly? Perhaps Christians should be grateful for the miserable conditions in many developing nations -- for the malnutrition and preventable diseases that claim the lives of many young children -- especially in Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or animistic communities! For by such wretched earthly deaths are their souls saved from the perdition that would surely await them were they to grow to maturity in their heathen communities and learn the ways of worshiping their idols, which are of course demons in disguise...
Is such talk offensive? Yes, it is. But it is also true. You cannot believe in Hell and escape the abominable implications that Hell makes against a God who would devise or permit its existence. You cannot believe in Hell without making God more of a cruel and capricious tyrant than any man who ever lived. You can talk all you want of His alleged "holiness" and "perfect justice," but you are weighing empty words against the visceral reality of suffering -- suffering compounded a million or a billion-fold over whatever you may have endured in this life. In the end it is simply insanity; and in the end, the sensible person gives it up.
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
"You don't know it, but the devil gave you the same idea..."
I don't understand how someone could sit through this entire thing.
The idea of evil, the devil, etc is a tough pill for the naturalistic materialist to swallow since there is no solid basis for even a concept of evil or transcendent value or meaning in such a worldview. This is why I find it hypocritical when a naturalistic materialist would say that the God of the Bible is evil and not good. How can a naturalistic materialist stand there and argue such a thing when they have no concept of good or evil that transcends that which natural selection chooses. In order for a naturalistic materialistic to make such an argument the naturalistic materialist must borrow elements of the Christian Worldview.
The idea of evil, the devil, etc is a tough pill for the naturalistic materialist to swallow since there is no solid basis for even a concept of evil or transcendent value or meaning in such a worldview. This is why I find it hypocritical when a naturalistic materialist would say that the God of the Bible is evil and not good. How can a naturalistic materialist stand there and argue such a thing when they have no concept of good or evil that transcends that which natural selection chooses.
Why does it need to be transcendental? What does "transcendental" mean here anyway? It's a grand impressive word that Christians break out when they need to move the goalposts: "Torturing people is wrong." "Ah, but is it transcendentally wrong? Only God determines what is transcendentally wrong, so I, who am speaking for God, win by definition." It is a fallacy, a falsehood, and a distraction to assert that the absence of transcendental wrongness (which, I can't stress this enough, is not even well-defined) implies the absence of wrongness. That is logically equivalent to saying that because there are no non-Euclidean U.S. senators, there are no U.S. senators. You are imposing a standard that is impossible to meet except by your theory, but since the standard is an invention of your theory in the first place and not obviously relevant to the reality on the ground, nobody else cares.
How would you feel if a Hindu told you that one of your principles was karmically wrong? Pretty unimpressed, right? Karma is the product of Hindu theory, and you don't subscribe to that theory. This doesn't mean that you don't believe in right and wrong, and it doesn't mean that she doesn't believe in right and wrong either. It means you have different ideas about the underlying nature of right and wrong. Do not be so arrogant as to assume that your religion provides the only possible explanation for the phenomenon. She is not a hypocrite if she is inconsistent with your ideas, only if she is inconsistent with her own ideas.
And such differences may be interesting philosophically, but when it comes to the question, "Is torture wrong?", both of you can probably agree that it is. Just like you can probably agree with me that torture is wrong. The disagreement now between us, when you get right down to it, is not a question of transcendentality at all; it's that I am trying to apply the principle that torture is wrong with consistency, whereas you are trying to make an exception for one particular torturer. And what was it I just said about inconsistency?
You cannot believe in Hell without making God more of a cruel and capricious tyrant than any man who ever lived.
sure you can. to put it more simply.
there are people in our society that breaks out laws. if the degree is sever enough then we lock them away for life and in some cases take their life.
Does that make us cruel and evil because we choose to remove people from society that make it worse?
While God is loving and God does care God is just. He will no longer allow or tolerate sin when he establishes His new kingdom. The new kingdom will be His perfect vision of what it should have been.
You can talk all you want of His alleged "holiness" and "perfect justice," but you are weighing empty words against the visceral reality of suffering -- suffering compounded a million or a billion-fold over whatever you may have endured in this life. In the end it is simply insanity;
It is only insanity because we judge it by our sense of right and wrong. this of course is severely limited in comparison to a perfect being.
If god was perfect he wouldn't have allowed sin to exist in the first place. I would argue Sin is a flaw in his design his hatred for sin is a flaw in itself. a perfect being would be unable to become impure regardless of outside stimuli.
Not true. God didn't allow sin to exist man allowed sin to exist by disobedience.
In the end you have to look at this way. In light of God's mercy and in light of God's plan it all goes back in a circle to who gets all the glory and that is God.
Christ's death reclaimed what was lost. In the book of revelation John writes: "every knee shall bow and every mouth will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord".
A perfect being cannot stand imperfection. Therefore God will not allow imperfection in his new kingdom.
government is a human institution made up of fallible and low powered humans.
yes it is. yet we still remove people from society.
God does the same thing. he removes people from his society. he will not allow sin or corruption to be present in the new kingdom.
this is perfectly in line with a perfectly just God.
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Wouldn't you think that if God, who is super wise and super just were to come up with a system of ultimate cosmic justice, it'd be a bit ahead of the barbaric crap people were working with several thousand years ago, or even what we're working with today?
The mere fact that we're comparing God's supposed justice to our own should tell you right away that it's not God's.
It is only insanity because we judge it by our sense of right and wrong. this of course is severely limited in comparison to a perfect being.
As I gather you and I both have, as do all civilized people, roughly equivalent senses of justice.
I look at the Biblical God and say, "What He's doing here doesn't look like justice at all." You reply, "Oh, it is justice; but His nature is so high beyond ours as to be incomprehensible to us."
Except that, since your sense of justice is roughly equivalent to mine, you can't be defending God's justice based on your own sense of justice, which is of course equally repulsed by the idea of people who are innocent (humanly speaking) being burned in a lake of fire forevermore. You call God just, rather, based on your faith that He must be. And when you get to heaven you will see things as He does and He will make it all make sense to you; and the fire of the burning sinners that "goes up forever in the sight of the saints" will be as pleasing to you then as it is to God...
...How does that not sound positively sinister?
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
The idea of evil, the devil, etc is a tough pill for the naturalistic materialist to swallow since there is no solid basis for even a concept of evil or transcendent value or meaning in such a worldview. This is why I find it hypocritical when a naturalistic materialist would say that the God of the Bible is evil and not good. How can a naturalistic materialist stand there and argue such a thing when they have no concept of good or evil that transcends that which natural selection chooses.
Why does it need to be transcendental? What does "transcendental" mean here anyway? It's a grand impressive word that Christians break out when they need to move the goalposts: "Torturing people is wrong." "Ah, but is it transcendentally wrong? Only God determines what is transcendentally wrong, so I, who am speaking for God, win by definition." It is a fallacy, a falsehood, and a distraction to assert that the absence of transcendental wrongness (which, I can't stress this enough, is not even well-defined) implies the absence of wrongness. That is logically equivalent to saying that because there are no non-Euclidean U.S. senators, there are no U.S. senators. You are imposing a standard that is impossible to meet except by your theory, but since the standard is an invention of your theory in the first place and not obviously relevant to the reality on the ground, nobody else cares.
How would you feel if a Hindu told you that one of your principles was karmically wrong? Pretty unimpressed, right? Karma is the product of Hindu theory, and you don't subscribe to that theory. This doesn't mean that you don't believe in right and wrong, and it doesn't mean that she doesn't believe in right and wrong either. It means you have different ideas about the underlying nature of right and wrong. Do not be so arrogant as to assume that your religion provides the only possible explanation for the phenomenon. She is not a hypocrite if she is inconsistent with your ideas, only if she is inconsistent with her own ideas.
And such differences may be interesting philosophically, but when it comes to the question, "Is torture wrong?", both of you can probably agree that it is. Just like you can probably agree with me that torture is wrong. The disagreement now between us, when you get right down to it, is not a question of transcendentality at all; it's that I am trying to apply the principle that torture is wrong with consistency, whereas you are trying to make an exception for one particular torturer. And what was it I just said about inconsistency?
If torture or rape was the best course of action that enabled a bag of protoplasm (which is all we really are from a naturalistic materialist perspective) and the rest of its race to pass on its traits to as many offspring as possible, then the naturalistic materialist would be forced to concede that this is good. There is simply no logical imperative within the worldview of the naturalistic materialistic that should lead to any other conclusion within the framework of the worldview of the naturalistic materialist.
I have a way of accounting for the everlasting conscious never-ceasing torture of unbelievers that stays totally consistent within the framework of a Christian worldview. You won't like it because you have a man-centered humanistic concept of morality. "Torture is always wrong" is a poor maxim to build a foundation on in order to establish a consistent morality for your worldview. There is simply nothing within the worldview of naturalistic materialism that is consistent with that premise. The only thing that a naturalistic materialist can say is that natural selection does not favor individuals, races, species, and societies that torture. I find that the argument is more emotional than based on sound logic that arises from a naturalistic materialist's worldview. Answer me this question: Why is torture wrong if it enables individuals, races, species, and societies that torture an edge in survival over those individuals, races, species, and societies that do not torture?
My worldview can supply an answer as to why torture is not always wrong. I can even give you the answer straight from the Biblical text. The answer is supplied in Romans 9. The answer hinges on the Biblical concept of common good. Any action serves the common good if it leads to an increase in the love, worship, and glorification of God within the universe. Why?
1. There is nothing greater than God. Any person who seeks satisfaction in anything other than God attempts to make the universe a worse place for everyone else because that person gives up the opportunity cost of promoting the greatest and most satisfying thing for humanity. If you are not promoting the worship of God, then you are promoting something else in the place of God. This is high treason against humanity and God because there is only one thing that does not fade, and that is God.
2. God is not cruel. He did not create a universe where the common good is out of alignment with that which is supremely satisfying for humanity forever. When God seeks to glorify Himself God seeks that which is eternally best for humanity.
God before the foundation of the world predestined every aspect of what He knew was the exact perfect community of believers to worship him for all eternity. God is justified in pursuing the common good of this community in whatever means necessary because to pursue the good of that community is the common good. If everything God does serves this end, then God has faithfully promoted the common good. So the question becomes does the damnation of the reprobate serve this end? It does serve this end. And the exact explanation of how it does is supplied in Romans 9:21-23:
Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—
You might argue that it does not, and that the reprobate could have glorified God if given a chance, but this simply is not what Jesus taught or the rest of the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that the natural man is totally evil, even incapable of doing good. See Genesis 6:5, Jeremiah 13:23, Matthew 7:17-19 if you doubt this. So that precludes the possibility of even believing or having faith on the part of the reprobate. There is simply no capacity for the reprobate to do so because they are not capable of good in God's eyes. So what would God create people who are incapable of doing good for? Damnation seems like the obvious answer to me. The damnation of the reprobate does not cause a decrease in the love, worship, and glorification of God because the reprobate never loved, worshiped, or glorified God in any way to begin with. There is only pure upside on the part of God in the damnation of the reprobate because the reprobate glorify Him just as much as before (which is none at all) and believers love, worship, and glorify God more because of it.
So in the end God pursues the common good of the believing community to the fullest, which means He maintains His holiness and righteousness in doing so. That is why the damnation of the reprobate is Holy.
I don't like a lot of Christian ideologies and beliefs regarding what is sin and what isn't.
But what I dislike more are people who belittle opinions without even trying to understand the other or respecting them.
And there is an utter abundance of that from a good number of people in this forum.
Heck, the overwhelming majority of people I see online are like this.
And just where is your respect for the beliefs of these hypothetical people, who it seems to me are just as entitled to respect for their belief that another belief is worthy of being belittled? Or do you propose that respect is to be withheld from some beliefs? If so, on what basis, and what if someone disagrees as to the basis?
Some beliefs are just garbage and should be identified as such. The false air of respect that some people arbitrarily attach to certain beliefs only impedes the critical examination thereof and is therefore pointless. My advice? Save your respect for people -- not beliefs.
If torture or rape was the best course of action that enabled a bag of protoplasm (which is all we really are from a naturalistic materialist perspective) and the rest of its race to pass on its traits to as many offspring as possible, then the naturalistic materialist would be forced to concede that this is good. There is simply no logical imperative within the worldview of the naturalistic materialistic that should lead to any other conclusion within the framework of the worldview of the naturalistic materialist.
You do realize that:
(a) not all (perhaps even not any) of your opponents subscribe to the view you are labeling "naturalistic materialism" -- for instance, Highroller is neither of those things (though I see he has, probably wisely, decided to stop engaging with you.)
(b) among those that do, not a single one of them has presupposed naturalistic materialism in their arguments. In fact all of your opponents have granted, for the sake of argument, that God exists (i.e. naturalism and materialism are both false) -- their beef with you concerns the nature of God Himself.
You have constructed a bogeyman. And even though you're wrong about that and everything that follows concerning naturalism and secular morality (look up the word "protoplasm" for one thing) it's not necessary to go down that path, because it's a blind alley.
I have a way of accounting for the everlasting conscious never-ceasing torture of unbelievers that stays totally consistent within the framework of a Christian worldview. You won't like it because you have a man-centered humanistic concept of morality. My worldview can supply an answer as to why torture is not always wrong. I can even give you the answer straight from the Biblical text. The answer is supplied in Romans 9.
I have a way of accounting for the absolute wrongness of even a finite amount of torture used on any victim whatsoever, also on the Christian worldview. It comes from Romans 2:15, which you seemed to have skipped over on your way to Romans 9.
The Bible teaches that the natural man is totally evil, even incapable of doing good. See Genesis 6:5, Jeremiah 13:23, Matthew 7:17-19 if you doubt this. So that precludes the possibility of even believing or having faith on the part of the reprobate. There is simply no capacity for the reprobate to do so because they are not capable of good in God's eyes. So what would God create people who are incapable of doing good for? Damnation seems like the obvious answer to me.
Me too. This is the whole crux of the problem!
The damnation of the reprobate does not cause a decrease in the love, worship, and glorification of God because the reprobate never loved, worshiped, or glorified God in any way to begin with.
It's not so much that he didn't as he couldn't -- God created him without the capacity to do so! By the way, "the reprobate," as you have pointed out, is everybody, including e.g. yourself.
God before the foundation of the world predestined every aspect of what He knew was the exact perfect community of believers to worship him for all eternity.
You mean a community of nobody. On your reading, he set a standard for his creations, then ensured through the act of creation that nobody would ever meet it. Anyone who makes it in is there on largesse, mercy, pity -- a charity case.
(a) not all (perhaps even not any) of your opponents subscribe to the view you are labeling "naturalistic materialism" -- for instance, Highroller is neither of those things (though I see he has, probably wisely, decided to stop engaging with you.)
I realize this. For the most part people in this forum fall within a couple of categories:
1. Naturalistic materialists: People who are open about not being Christians or religious at all.
2. Self Identifying Non-Christian, but religious.
3. Self-Identifying Christian, but really just closet naturalistic materialistic humanists who think Jesus was a good moral teacher and maybe believe in some form of non-material world. Essentially, it is a baby step away from naturalistic matericalism. Ultimately, this worldview collapses on itself because this worldview picks and chooses what it wants to believe about Jesus. Jesus simply is a lackey to their naturalistic materialistic humanism. Where Jesus agrees with naturalistic materialistic humanism this worldview will gladly accept what Jesus says. When Jesus says things that are clearly incompatible with their naturalistic materialistic humanism they will reject him. The key here is to not take Jesus on every jot and tittle and thus reject him for naturalistic materialistic humanism and deceive oneself into thinking that following him can mean picking and choosing where Jesus agrees with their true religion of naturalistic materialistic humanism.
4. True Christians, who do not pick and choose what Jesus taught, but actually accept the Bible and Jesus in His totality and thus reject naturalism, materialism, and humanism in favor of the true God and the true religion.
I have a way of accounting for the absolute wrongness of even a finite amount of torture used on any victim whatsoever, also on the Christian worldview. It comes from Romans 2:15, which you seemed to have skipped over on your way to Romans 9.
Why do you think that makes it wrong for God to torture the damned?
It's not so much that he didn't as he couldn't -- God created him without the capacity to do so! By the way, "the reprobate," as you have pointed out, is everybody, including e.g. yourself.
Not everyone is reprobate. There are the reprobate and those who follow Jesus. Followers of Jesus are those who are predestined to be like Jesus. They are the ones who are regenerated by the Spirit of God, and given a new nature that loves the things of God. These are the people that Jesus calls sheep.
You mean a community of nobody. On your reading, he set a standard for his creations, then ensured through the act of creation that nobody would ever meet it. Anyone who makes it in is there on largesse, mercy, pity -- a charity case.
No that is not what I mean. I mean a community of hand picked people that God chooses to cleanse from the evil nature by giving them a new heart that desires the things of God rather than the things of this world.
God creates an entire group of people already destined to hell to show just how awesome he is to the group that is predestined to heaven?
Yo, if God created me for the express purpose of being incapable of following his orders so I'll be tortured in the afterlife, then he's a chode.
I say we band together and kill God.
Whatever Jesus you believe in must have given the Pharisees a reason to want to murder him. The limp-wristed hair dresser from San Francisco that would be attending the local book club that wants to make romantic love with you is not the Jesus that the Pharisees crucified. A group of people already murdered God once when Jesus told them that very exact disturbing truth that you call Him a chode for. I don't think that is the proper response. I think you'd be better off getting on your knees before the Lord of the universe and mourning the cosmic treason you have committed against Him and begging for mercy from the good Lord. God rewards the humble not murderers.
Jail is finite. You can be released from jail. Those who are sent to jail have the opportunity to contest their guilt. Jail is not deliberately torturous.
Oh, and god's punishment? not for killing. It's for failure to sufficiently kiss his ass.
Once again, a government can be evil if the punishments it doles out are not just or if the laws they consider worthy of these punishments are bad. It is possible to recognize the vast gulf between a western nation imprisoning someone (which I have issues with, which you seem to be assuming I don't) and a North Korean death camp.
In addition, government is a human institution made up of fallible and low powered humans. If human institutions are the best God can strive towards, he is an impotent God.
http://youtu.be/aozqWJ74bZ8
"You don't know it, but the devil gave you the same idea..."
I don't understand how someone could sit through this entire thing.
How can anyone reasonably believe this stuff?
I mean, not that it's impossible, heck, it may be right as rain - but damn, what a job.
Thanks to Xenphire @ Inkfox for the amazing new sig
“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Lovely way to put it. Accepting God's love for you and receiving Jesus as lord and savior is "kissing his ass".
If god was perfect he wouldn't have allowed sin to exist in the first place. I would argue Sin is a flaw in his design his hatred for sin is a flaw in itself. a perfect being would be unable to become impure regardless of outside stimuli.
A reminder, replace "breaking your knees" with "forcing you to undergo unimaginable torment for the rest of eternity." Imagine if Al Capone could have threatened you with that.
Caponism would be very popular to say the least
God/Jesus loves us, and it is up to us to accept and reciprocate on that love. If you do so, then you are saved and will God for eternity.
If you do not, then you remain separated from God for eternity and go off to Hell upon death.
Because, while God loves everyone, he also loves justice, and he cannot accept anyone who refuses to atone for their sin.
This is different from the mob boss analogy you attempted.
Look, I get that people don't like the premise that we are all sinners who cannot remove our sins through our own actions and can be saved only by accepting Jesus. I don't like it.
I don't like a lot of Christian ideologies and beliefs regarding what is sin and what isn't.
But what I dislike more are people who belittle opinions without even trying to understand the other or respecting them.
And there is an utter abundance of that from a good number of people in this forum.
Heck, the overwhelming majority of people I see online are like this.
You're asking me to respect beliefs that are morally bankrupt and not evidently true. It's a disrespectful belief system so that says that you and me and everyone else is so horrible and irredeemable that we deserve no less than eternal torture. Why should I respect that?
Here's another angle: based on Isaiah 7:15 and Jesus's declaration that the kingdom of heaven belongs to "such as these" (referencing little children), Christianity has overwhelmingly adopted the doctrine of an "age of accountability." The idea is that before a certain age children cannot be held culpable for their sins, since they simply don't know any better; and therefore, any child who dies before this age is unconditionally let into Heaven. The doctrine makes sense on a visceral level, since not even the most callous person would claim that babies and toddlers could deserve the tortures of Hell.
Of course, there's no agreement as to what the age of accountability actually is; but a much larger and more disturbing problem with this idea presents itself. Namely, if God really wanted to save as many souls as possible, wouldn't he snuff our lives out before it even became possible for us to damn ourselves by our own folly? Perhaps Christians should be grateful for the miserable conditions in many developing nations -- for the malnutrition and preventable diseases that claim the lives of many young children -- especially in Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or animistic communities! For by such wretched earthly deaths are their souls saved from the perdition that would surely await them were they to grow to maturity in their heathen communities and learn the ways of worshiping their idols, which are of course demons in disguise...
Is such talk offensive? Yes, it is. But it is also true. You cannot believe in Hell and escape the abominable implications that Hell makes against a God who would devise or permit its existence. You cannot believe in Hell without making God more of a cruel and capricious tyrant than any man who ever lived. You can talk all you want of His alleged "holiness" and "perfect justice," but you are weighing empty words against the visceral reality of suffering -- suffering compounded a million or a billion-fold over whatever you may have endured in this life. In the end it is simply insanity; and in the end, the sensible person gives it up.
The idea of evil, the devil, etc is a tough pill for the naturalistic materialist to swallow since there is no solid basis for even a concept of evil or transcendent value or meaning in such a worldview. This is why I find it hypocritical when a naturalistic materialist would say that the God of the Bible is evil and not good. How can a naturalistic materialist stand there and argue such a thing when they have no concept of good or evil that transcends that which natural selection chooses. In order for a naturalistic materialistic to make such an argument the naturalistic materialist must borrow elements of the Christian Worldview.
Why does it need to be transcendental? What does "transcendental" mean here anyway? It's a grand impressive word that Christians break out when they need to move the goalposts: "Torturing people is wrong." "Ah, but is it transcendentally wrong? Only God determines what is transcendentally wrong, so I, who am speaking for God, win by definition." It is a fallacy, a falsehood, and a distraction to assert that the absence of transcendental wrongness (which, I can't stress this enough, is not even well-defined) implies the absence of wrongness. That is logically equivalent to saying that because there are no non-Euclidean U.S. senators, there are no U.S. senators. You are imposing a standard that is impossible to meet except by your theory, but since the standard is an invention of your theory in the first place and not obviously relevant to the reality on the ground, nobody else cares.
How would you feel if a Hindu told you that one of your principles was karmically wrong? Pretty unimpressed, right? Karma is the product of Hindu theory, and you don't subscribe to that theory. This doesn't mean that you don't believe in right and wrong, and it doesn't mean that she doesn't believe in right and wrong either. It means you have different ideas about the underlying nature of right and wrong. Do not be so arrogant as to assume that your religion provides the only possible explanation for the phenomenon. She is not a hypocrite if she is inconsistent with your ideas, only if she is inconsistent with her own ideas.
And such differences may be interesting philosophically, but when it comes to the question, "Is torture wrong?", both of you can probably agree that it is. Just like you can probably agree with me that torture is wrong. The disagreement now between us, when you get right down to it, is not a question of transcendentality at all; it's that I am trying to apply the principle that torture is wrong with consistency, whereas you are trying to make an exception for one particular torturer. And what was it I just said about inconsistency?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
sure you can. to put it more simply.
there are people in our society that breaks out laws. if the degree is sever enough then we lock them away for life and in some cases take their life.
Does that make us cruel and evil because we choose to remove people from society that make it worse?
While God is loving and God does care God is just. He will no longer allow or tolerate sin when he establishes His new kingdom. The new kingdom will be His perfect vision of what it should have been.
It is only insanity because we judge it by our sense of right and wrong. this of course is severely limited in comparison to a perfect being.
Not true. God didn't allow sin to exist man allowed sin to exist by disobedience.
In the end you have to look at this way. In light of God's mercy and in light of God's plan it all goes back in a circle to who gets all the glory and that is God.
Christ's death reclaimed what was lost. In the book of revelation John writes: "every knee shall bow and every mouth will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord".
A perfect being cannot stand imperfection. Therefore God will not allow imperfection in his new kingdom.
yes it is. yet we still remove people from society.
God does the same thing. he removes people from his society. he will not allow sin or corruption to be present in the new kingdom.
this is perfectly in line with a perfectly just God.
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But God is all powerful, he can make himself stand imperfection.
The mere fact that we're comparing God's supposed justice to our own should tell you right away that it's not God's.
As I gather you and I both have, as do all civilized people, roughly equivalent senses of justice.
I look at the Biblical God and say, "What He's doing here doesn't look like justice at all." You reply, "Oh, it is justice; but His nature is so high beyond ours as to be incomprehensible to us."
Except that, since your sense of justice is roughly equivalent to mine, you can't be defending God's justice based on your own sense of justice, which is of course equally repulsed by the idea of people who are innocent (humanly speaking) being burned in a lake of fire forevermore. You call God just, rather, based on your faith that He must be. And when you get to heaven you will see things as He does and He will make it all make sense to you; and the fire of the burning sinners that "goes up forever in the sight of the saints" will be as pleasing to you then as it is to God...
...How does that not sound positively sinister?
If torture or rape was the best course of action that enabled a bag of protoplasm (which is all we really are from a naturalistic materialist perspective) and the rest of its race to pass on its traits to as many offspring as possible, then the naturalistic materialist would be forced to concede that this is good. There is simply no logical imperative within the worldview of the naturalistic materialistic that should lead to any other conclusion within the framework of the worldview of the naturalistic materialist.
I have a way of accounting for the everlasting conscious never-ceasing torture of unbelievers that stays totally consistent within the framework of a Christian worldview. You won't like it because you have a man-centered humanistic concept of morality. "Torture is always wrong" is a poor maxim to build a foundation on in order to establish a consistent morality for your worldview. There is simply nothing within the worldview of naturalistic materialism that is consistent with that premise. The only thing that a naturalistic materialist can say is that natural selection does not favor individuals, races, species, and societies that torture. I find that the argument is more emotional than based on sound logic that arises from a naturalistic materialist's worldview. Answer me this question: Why is torture wrong if it enables individuals, races, species, and societies that torture an edge in survival over those individuals, races, species, and societies that do not torture?
My worldview can supply an answer as to why torture is not always wrong. I can even give you the answer straight from the Biblical text. The answer is supplied in Romans 9. The answer hinges on the Biblical concept of common good. Any action serves the common good if it leads to an increase in the love, worship, and glorification of God within the universe. Why?
1. There is nothing greater than God. Any person who seeks satisfaction in anything other than God attempts to make the universe a worse place for everyone else because that person gives up the opportunity cost of promoting the greatest and most satisfying thing for humanity. If you are not promoting the worship of God, then you are promoting something else in the place of God. This is high treason against humanity and God because there is only one thing that does not fade, and that is God.
2. God is not cruel. He did not create a universe where the common good is out of alignment with that which is supremely satisfying for humanity forever. When God seeks to glorify Himself God seeks that which is eternally best for humanity.
God before the foundation of the world predestined every aspect of what He knew was the exact perfect community of believers to worship him for all eternity. God is justified in pursuing the common good of this community in whatever means necessary because to pursue the good of that community is the common good. If everything God does serves this end, then God has faithfully promoted the common good. So the question becomes does the damnation of the reprobate serve this end? It does serve this end. And the exact explanation of how it does is supplied in Romans 9:21-23:
You might argue that it does not, and that the reprobate could have glorified God if given a chance, but this simply is not what Jesus taught or the rest of the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that the natural man is totally evil, even incapable of doing good. See Genesis 6:5, Jeremiah 13:23, Matthew 7:17-19 if you doubt this. So that precludes the possibility of even believing or having faith on the part of the reprobate. There is simply no capacity for the reprobate to do so because they are not capable of good in God's eyes. So what would God create people who are incapable of doing good for? Damnation seems like the obvious answer to me. The damnation of the reprobate does not cause a decrease in the love, worship, and glorification of God because the reprobate never loved, worshiped, or glorified God in any way to begin with. There is only pure upside on the part of God in the damnation of the reprobate because the reprobate glorify Him just as much as before (which is none at all) and believers love, worship, and glorify God more because of it.
So in the end God pursues the common good of the believing community to the fullest, which means He maintains His holiness and righteousness in doing so. That is why the damnation of the reprobate is Holy.
So wait, let me get this straight.
God creates an entire group of people already destined to hell to show just how awesome he is to the group that is predestined to heaven?
And just where is your respect for the beliefs of these hypothetical people, who it seems to me are just as entitled to respect for their belief that another belief is worthy of being belittled? Or do you propose that respect is to be withheld from some beliefs? If so, on what basis, and what if someone disagrees as to the basis?
Some beliefs are just garbage and should be identified as such. The false air of respect that some people arbitrarily attach to certain beliefs only impedes the critical examination thereof and is therefore pointless. My advice? Save your respect for people -- not beliefs.
You do realize that:
(a) not all (perhaps even not any) of your opponents subscribe to the view you are labeling "naturalistic materialism" -- for instance, Highroller is neither of those things (though I see he has, probably wisely, decided to stop engaging with you.)
(b) among those that do, not a single one of them has presupposed naturalistic materialism in their arguments. In fact all of your opponents have granted, for the sake of argument, that God exists (i.e. naturalism and materialism are both false) -- their beef with you concerns the nature of God Himself.
You have constructed a bogeyman. And even though you're wrong about that and everything that follows concerning naturalism and secular morality (look up the word "protoplasm" for one thing) it's not necessary to go down that path, because it's a blind alley.
I have a way of accounting for the absolute wrongness of even a finite amount of torture used on any victim whatsoever, also on the Christian worldview. It comes from Romans 2:15, which you seemed to have skipped over on your way to Romans 9.
Me too. This is the whole crux of the problem!
It's not so much that he didn't as he couldn't -- God created him without the capacity to do so! By the way, "the reprobate," as you have pointed out, is everybody, including e.g. yourself.
You mean a community of nobody. On your reading, he set a standard for his creations, then ensured through the act of creation that nobody would ever meet it. Anyone who makes it in is there on largesse, mercy, pity -- a charity case.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I say we band together and kill God.
Art is life itself.
I realize this. For the most part people in this forum fall within a couple of categories:
1. Naturalistic materialists: People who are open about not being Christians or religious at all.
2. Self Identifying Non-Christian, but religious.
3. Self-Identifying Christian, but really just closet naturalistic materialistic humanists who think Jesus was a good moral teacher and maybe believe in some form of non-material world. Essentially, it is a baby step away from naturalistic matericalism. Ultimately, this worldview collapses on itself because this worldview picks and chooses what it wants to believe about Jesus. Jesus simply is a lackey to their naturalistic materialistic humanism. Where Jesus agrees with naturalistic materialistic humanism this worldview will gladly accept what Jesus says. When Jesus says things that are clearly incompatible with their naturalistic materialistic humanism they will reject him. The key here is to not take Jesus on every jot and tittle and thus reject him for naturalistic materialistic humanism and deceive oneself into thinking that following him can mean picking and choosing where Jesus agrees with their true religion of naturalistic materialistic humanism.
4. True Christians, who do not pick and choose what Jesus taught, but actually accept the Bible and Jesus in His totality and thus reject naturalism, materialism, and humanism in favor of the true God and the true religion.
Why do you think that makes it wrong for God to torture the damned?
Why is it a problem if it brings glory to God?
Not everyone is reprobate. There are the reprobate and those who follow Jesus. Followers of Jesus are those who are predestined to be like Jesus. They are the ones who are regenerated by the Spirit of God, and given a new nature that loves the things of God. These are the people that Jesus calls sheep.
No that is not what I mean. I mean a community of hand picked people that God chooses to cleanse from the evil nature by giving them a new heart that desires the things of God rather than the things of this world.
Whatever Jesus you believe in must have given the Pharisees a reason to want to murder him. The limp-wristed hair dresser from San Francisco that would be attending the local book club that wants to make romantic love with you is not the Jesus that the Pharisees crucified. A group of people already murdered God once when Jesus told them that very exact disturbing truth that you call Him a chode for. I don't think that is the proper response. I think you'd be better off getting on your knees before the Lord of the universe and mourning the cosmic treason you have committed against Him and begging for mercy from the good Lord. God rewards the humble not murderers.
Yep...that is what Romans 9 says.